President Joe Biden’s “floating pier” for Gaza is a dismal failure, and a symbol of how “infrastructure” has fared under his presidency.
As Breitbart News’ Kristina Wong has reported, the $230 million structure has been plagued by problems since it launched in mid-May: “[I]t broke into pieces due to waves, has had to be dismantled twice, and has delivered far less aid than envisioned.”
Exclusive video of Biden’s shoddy Gaza Pier (before it broke into pieces): pic.twitter.com/Xqyqjt7Ru4
— Kristina Wong 🇺🇸 (@kristina_wong) June 14, 2024
The New York Times said that the pier had only been in use for 10 days over the first month of its poeration, and had “largely failed.” It adds little to the aid that is already brought into Gaza by truck and airdrop; Wong’s sources said the pier was placing U.S. troops’ lives in danger for the sake of a “photo-op.”
The pier was a key promise of Biden’s State of the Union address in March. It was not part of the 2021 $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law that Congress passed in 2021. But it may as well have been; that, too, has been a failure.
The law allocated $7.5 billion to the construction of a nationwide network of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations. But of the 500,000 promised charging stations, only “seven or eight” have been built, two and-a-half years later.
It gets worse.
The law allocated $42.5 billion to connect rural America to broadband Internet. However, as Federal Communications Commission (FCC) member Brendan Carr noted earlier this month, it “has not connected even 1 person with those funds. In fact, it now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at earliest.”
Carr also said Biden had added “a partisan political agenda” to the program, slowing it down in deference to liberal policy goals.
The White House likes to mock former President Donald Trump for failing to move beyond “infrastructure week” — ignoring the fact that House Democrats refused to pass his private-sector-driven version of infrastructure spending, and that Senate Republicans said they would never pass Trump’s trillion-dollar proposal. (Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was eager to whip votes for Biden’s more expensive, government-run bill five years later.)
The truth is emerging: Biden, a politician for half a century, does not know how to build anything.
The Gaza pier is redundant; it is poorly designed for its environment, in the choppy eastern Mediterranean; and is also too expensive.
Were it not for the fact that the military was in charge of building it it never would have been built at all: Biden, unlike Trump, refuses to cut through the government bureaucrats, special-interest middlemen, and union-boss hierarchies who are the real beneficiaries of his “infrastructure” spending.
Biden is no better at private-sector investment than at government projects.
This week, the Fisker EV company, went bankrupt — again. The first time, in 2009, Biden promised the company would deliver “green jobs” — in Delaware.
Last August, Proterra, an electric bus company that Biden promoted enthusiastically, also went under.
And who could forget Solyndra, the solar panel company that then-Vice President Biden personally visited, and which then failed?
The only thing that Biden is good at doing is providing business opportunities for his relatives. His son, Hunter Biden, convicted this week for lying on a federal gun purchase form, still faces tax evasion charges for his influence-peddling.
Pity the Chinese nomenklatura who poured millions into the Biden family, only to see them abscond with the cash.
The money could not save Hunter Biden’s client, Ye Jianming, from capricious Chinese authorities. In fact, the best defense Biden and his family have against accusations of bribery is that it is hard to figure out what they did in return.
The fact is that Joe Biden cannot build anything. He simply enriches those around him. And we are paying the bill.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
